China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  But most life under the Japanese occupation was not the high life. By 1945, thanks to the scarcity resulting from the years of conflict, the Japanese had imposed a strict regime of rationing on both the cities and the countryside; in Shanghai, for example, electricity use was restricted to the point that most families had only enough power to burn a fifteen-watt lightbulb for a few minutes a day. And, needless to say, there was censorship of all anti-Japanese sentiment. On the day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over the foreign settlements that had been established in Shanghai a century earlier and where Chinese sovereignty did not apply, and immediately ordered the burning of all newspapers, journals, and books that dealt with contemporary history. There were bonfires in front of every lane. Orders went out for every household to turn in its radios, and all men between eighteen and thirty years of age were required to join local neighborhood vigilance committees and to be part of eight-hour shifts of block-to-block surveillance. watt lightbulb for a few minutes a day. And, needless to say, there was censorship of all anti-Japanese sentiment. On the day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over the foreign settlements that had been established in Shanghai a century earlier and where Chinese sovereignty did not apply, and immediately ordered the burning of all newspapers, journals, and books that dealt with contemporary history. There were bonfires in front of every lane. Orders went out for every household to turn in its radios, and all men between eighteen and thirty years of age were required to join local neighborhood vigilance committees and to be part of eight-hour shifts of block-to-block surveillance. Torture of opponents was practiced at police headquarters, and included spraying water in the nose, pulling out fingernails, and something called the sesame roll, where a victim was stuffed into a tightly knotted hemp sack and kicked back and forth.

  As Japan became increasingly distracted by its losses in the Pacific and by preparations to defend the home island against an expected invasion, Japanese troops were shipped out of Shanghai and were replaced by collaborationist Chinese troops from Manchuria. These were called “fur hat soldiers” because they wore the clothes appropriate for their cold northern homeland. This happened despite constant Japanese proclamations that triumph was following upon triumph; these successes, some of them no doubt actually occurring on the military front, were sometimes announced on giant propaganda balloons with streamers that floated above Shanghai’s racetrack. The Manchurian detachments were, if anything, worse than the Japanese they replaced. They “raped and pillaged their way into Shanghai,” according to Wakeman. They demanded that the Japanese create “comfort stations” for them, the wartime euphemism for places of prostitution set up for Japanese soldiers, and when the Japanese replied that there was a shortage of prostitutes, the Manchurians went house to house and rounded up “surviving elderly women for their carnal pleasure.”

  The assaults on Chinese women were inhuman and innumerable. As they did in Korea and Southeast Asia, the Japanese maintained these “comfort stations” throughout China—officially there were 280 of them throughout the country—so that there could be one “comfort woman” for every forty soldiers. Casual rape took place in occupied districts: village girls simply taken away and used for the pleasure of Japanese officers and lower-ranking men, with disease and lasting shame the consequence for the victim. “They raped many women, including one who’d just given birth three days earlier,” a witness to a Japanese raid on Fenglin village in Yongjia District, Zhejiang province, remembered years later. Another witness, a woman named Fu Yang, was a child when the Japanese came to her village, also in Zhejiang. “The Japanese raped ‘flower girls,’ whether they were six years old or sixty years old,” she told an interviewer decades later. “My mother would rub black dirt all over my face every day, dress me in boy’s clothes and keep my hair cut short, so afraid was she that the Japanese would take me. Our neighbor, Mrs. Wang, was already sixty, but she didn’t escape. The Japanese took her and later burned her to death.”

  A woman mourns over a boy killed in the Sino-Japanese War, one of the millions of casualties of that conflict, which lasted from 1937 to 1945. (illustration credit 3)

  For millions of Chinese who were not direct victims of the Japanese aggression or who were not affected by the actual violence of the fighting, the war brought tremendous hardship nonetheless, along with deep psychological wounds. The Chinese army was plagued by troop shortages for the whole war, in large part because of the heavy casualties, and this created an ongoing affliction for villages throughout the unoccupied zone, such that many peasants felt they were better off under Japanese control than under that of the government. In November 1944, shortly after arriving in China, Wedemeyer explained to Marshall why a country of 425 million people didn’t have an impressive number of military recruits. Recruitment couldn’t be carried out in Japanese-controlled territory, and Japan controlled the major population centers of eastern China. Beyond that, a lot of otherwise able men were needed in agriculture, or the country would starve, and in industry, working to produce the goods the country needed to stay in the war. Also, Wedemeyer said, “malnutrition, lack of hygiene, poor sanitation and deplorable medical service all contribute to reduce the number of men physically able to perform military service.”

  “Conscription comes to the Chinese peasant like famine or flood, only more regularly—every year twice—and claims more victims,” Wedemeyer wrote after he’d observed America’s Chinese ally for a few months. “Famine, flood, and drought compare with conscription like chicken pox with plague.” Reporting on conditions in the band of provinces stretching across central China from Shandong to Anhui, Edward Rice, a China expert attached to the American embassy, said, “All but the poorest people are able to evade military service. Conscripts are ill-treated and are given little or no training. Army officers engage in trade and in smuggling narcotics while their soldiers live off the people. Guerrilla units practice extortion against transient merchants and local well-to-do elements,” with the result that the people had been aroused to “hostility and opposition.”

  Other observers, including Theodore White, had reported that conscription in the KMT army was really a kind of kidnapping with supposed recruits literally roped together and marched at gunpoint away from their homes, this while the president of their country lived among whispering servants and ancient paintings.

  Many of these unwilling recruits were taken away from wives and children who suffered the loss of their economic support as a result. China was not the United States, where the salaries of troops in the field were paid to their wives on the home front. Innumerable Chinese women were left in poverty as long as their husbands were away, or permanently if they were killed, as so many of them were. The war also brought massive dislocation. Liu Qunying, born in 1921 in Wuhan, told an American scholar that she, her little brother, and her mother became refugees after their home was destroyed in the Japanese bombing of January 1938. Their goal was to reach Sichuan province in China’s southwest, where the Kuomintang government itself was to take refuge a few months later.

  “A sea of people with their belongings congested the roads and made the movement very slow and chaotic,” she said. “We had to stay with the crowd on the major roads, for bandits often attacked straying refugees, especially women and children.…During the day, we moved slowly with the sea of people and ate the dry steamed buns we carried with us. At night, we just spread our only comforter on the ground, and my mother and I took turns sleeping for a few hours at a time.”

  Liu and her mother and brother were part of one of the largest migrations of recent history, the removal of millions of people from the cities and villages invaded, bombed, and pillaged by the Japanese. They moved westward to the unoccupied provinces in search of shelter and work. During the war whole cities, including Changsha, Guilin, and Xuzhou, were essentially emptied of their populations. Huge numbers of people from occupied and desecrated cities like Shanghai, Canton, Nanjing, and Hankou joined the throngs that jumbled along th
e roads and riverbanks heading west.

  Observers at the time marveled at the labor of this dislocation, such as the scene early in the war when seven thousand coolies could be seen along the cliffs above the Yangzi River pulling seven thousand rickshaws loaded with all the manhole covers, sewer gratings, and radiators that could be salvaged from Hankou before the Japanese captured the city in October 1937. A Canadian Catholic missionary, observing the procession south of Xuzhou, wrote, “A long ribbon of ox carts stretches without interruption. This is the whole population of the North in flight. The women and children are on the carts, in the middle of bundles, baskets, sacks, chicks, goats, etc. Many are in tears, the children are crying. The men beat the oxen. Impossible to stop, only to go on. In the middle of all this are incredible numbers of soldiers … all is gloom. One only breathes dust.”

  The American journalist Jack Belden, who covered the four-month battle for Xuzhou, wrote of “oxen, horses, donkeys” all “fleeing along the way.”

  Some young men were carrying baggage and their household belongings, while others shouldered old men on their backs. Some had children in their arms, some had bedding and some carried their old mothers or their sick wives. Molecules of misery bumping and crowding into each other—an old woman with bound feet, a wrinkled patriarch sleeping in a cart—all fleeing destruction.

  At some point along their part of this migration, Liu and her mother met two brothers who were fleeing their home in Anhui province, and they helped them walk the entire distance to Enshi in Sichuan, where Liu’s high school had reportedly relocated. In exchange for the help of the older of the brothers, Liu had to submit to his sexual advances, with her mother’s silent consent. In Enshi, they discovered that the school had in fact never been established there. The town, near Hubei, was crowded with refugees. Prices were high. “I felt so sad and hopeless. We did not have any control over our lives, and every day we lived in great fear.… For our safety, we had to stay with the two brothers. To me, it meant that I had to satisfy the older brother’s sexual needs against my will, to endure a painful existence for the sake of my mother and my young brother.” From Enshi, the group made its way to Chungking, which was, and is, perched on steep hills overlooking the confluence of the Yangzi and the Jialong rivers. Chungking was itself the site of an amazing story of misery and resistance. The government, as we’ve seen, moved there at the end of 1938 in order to be beyond the reach of the Japanese invasion. Many universities relocated to the areas outside of the city. Factories that were dismantled ahead of the Japanese invasion were moved piece by piece to Sichuan and Yunnan provinces and reconstructed there. This meant a tremendous influx of government officials, teachers, technicians, factory managers, and others converging on the same backward, inadequate city as the more desperate refugees. The officials had salaries, though they lived in conditions that were spare and difficult at best.

  Cecil Beaton, the society photographer who visited China at the behest of the British Ministry of Information in 1944, spoke of the world of “bamboo, mud, and flies,” of a China never far removed from the stench of the latrine. The bureaucrats and professors lived in leaky, rat-infested rooms stifling in Chungking’s torrid, humid summer and freezing in the dank, wet winter. Beaton called on a professor from Fudan University, removed from its home in Shanghai to Chungking. “He subsists on poor quality rice,” Beaton said.

  He sleeps and works in a prison-like cell, with no one to tend him. He possesses no furniture except perhaps a board propped on two dictionaries as a bed, and a case with shelves for the volumes salvaged from his former life. In accordance with the “Oil Thrift” movement, the lamp must be put out early at night.

  There was no plumbing, so water had to be purchased from coolies who carried it up on balancing poles from the river. Prices were high, especially toward the end of the war. “Living like peasants,” Beaton wrote,

  are the great specialists and experts on French literature or European philosophy; men who have been editors of scientific magazines, who have been the pivot of intellectual life and thought, are stranded here without money for cigarettes, some of them suffering from foot-rot so they are unable to walk, and others from disease caused by under-nourishment and lack of baths. Yet they remain astoundingly cheerful and full of verve.

  They also lived with perpetual air raid alarms and, for months at a time, daily visits to shelters dug out of Chungking’s steep hills. On the second night after his arrival in Chungking late in 1944, General Wedemeyer was kept awake listening to an aerial bombardment of the city, a reminder, he said, that “China was indeed at the end of the pipeline.” As of the end of 1941, out of the $145 million in Lend-Lease supplies that had been promised to China, only $26 million had arrived, and a lot of that was in Burma waiting to be shipped over the Burma Road to China. Wedemeyer noted on that night in Chungking, almost three years later, that from time to time a bomb would land near the entrance of one of the bomb shelters dug out of the city’s cliffs and the civilians who had taken refuge there would be buried alive. Even then, six years after the beginning of the war, five since Chiang had made Chungking his temporary wartime capital, there were still no anti-aircraft guns or modern warning equipment and the “Japs consequently could bomb with impunity, particularly just before nightfall.” Wedemeyer’s conclusion was that “something had to be done about this,” but nothing was.

  The lives of the displaced officials and teachers whom Beaton met were almost luxurious compared to those of people like Liu or the numberless others who took shelter in shanties that were then torn down by the police, who could get no medical treatment because they had no money, and who were reduced to begging to survive. Many of these people found homes, if that’s the word, in the vast shantytown that sprang up in the narrow flats of the two rivers that come together in Chungking. “Humans in the slum co-existed with domestic and wild dogs, cats, mice, and other insects,” one former resident of the riverbank remembered, “including fleas and cockroaches. In the summer, the damp riverbank was a breeding ground for mosquitoes.… We were miserable all year round.”

  While on her journey westward, Liu discovered that she was pregnant. She and her mother and brother, along with the two brothers they had met on the way, would walk for a day, then her mother and their traveling companions would find work for a few days to get food for the trip ahead. It took a year to get to Chungking. Liu gave birth to a child who was in poor health from the beginning and died when Liu, running for the cover of some trees during a Japanese bombardment, fell.

  “We dug a hole in a field and buried him and moved on with our journey,” she said many years later. “My heart was broken. Even today I do not know where he was buried.”

  When the group arrived in Chungking, Liu married the older brother, who turned out to be a drinker and a philanderer. He frequented brothels. He brought girls home and demanded that his wife cook for them. Eventually her husband left for good, and Liu got a job teaching in the elementary school of the War Relief Bureau in Chungking. Her mother and she did washing and cleaning jobs. The principal at her school helped himself to part of her salary. She had another child, a daughter, who fell ill with pneumonia, but there was no money for medicine, and “she died in my arms.”

  In April 1944, having failed to force a Chinese surrender and facing the likelihood that the United States would use Chinese territory for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, Japan brought the period of stalemate to an end, launching the Ichigo campaign to secure the provinces of Henan, Hunan, and Guangxi. This was the second period of prolonged and intense fighting of the eight-year war as the Japanese attempted to achieve two goals. One was to open a land route to Indochina, which Japan had seized in 1940, in order to move troops and supplies on the rail lines from Haiphong harbor all the way to Manchuria and then by ship to Japan itself. The second was to destroy the numerous airfields used by the American 14th Air Force to bomb Japanese targets both in occupied China and in the Pacific. It was in this camp
aign that Changsha was finally taken.

  The Ichigo campaign has never received much attention in the West, in large part because it came simultaneously with other important engagements in the war, including the Allied landings in Normandy. Still, stretching out over the entire second half of 1944, it was the single largest Japanese offensive of the war, involving half a million men in seventeen divisions, some of them moved from Manchuria and the Japanese home islands. On the Chinese side were an equal number of men, many of them, as always, malnourished and underequipped and fighting with their usual inconsistency, running away at times, standing and dying at others.